May 09, 2009

Le Sens Propre: A new short film shot with RED + CS4

Working on a commission from Adobe, Brazilian director Cisma* recently created “Le Sens Propre,” rather surreal story about “a dream-like voyage in the universe of a little girl.” Cisma & team used a RED camera followed by an exclusive Adobe CS4 Production Premium workflow (no non-Adobe products touched the film–no 3D software, etc.).

Adobe’s Scott Morris writes,

Several high-profile artists have been commissioned by Adobe to do work using the various CS4 toolsets, to really show off what the products can do. Le Sens Proper now joins work from other artists and graphic designers including John Kelly, Nando Costa, Genevieve Gauckler, and Erik Natzke.

Thoughts on FXG Design and Motivation

On Monday I mentioned the new FXG format being developed to offer and easier a way to exchange data between Photoshop & other applications. The mention attracted some questions in the post’s comments & elsewhere. Adobe Sr. Principal Scientist Mark Anders was instrumental in the design of FXG, and now he’s posted his Thoughts on FXG Design and Motivation. It’s a fairly geeky subject, but if you care about things like file formats and standards, you may find Mark’s post interesting.

For what it’s worth, I started petitioning Macromedia and Adobe ten years ago for something like FXG for motion graphics–an XML-based way to move layers, keyframes, etc. between Flash, After Effects, and other tools. Flash is at last moving away from the opaque FLA format to something called XFL, and FXG works hand in glove with XFL. Progress can take a while, but dammit, it does happen.